This week I had the pleasure of seeing Alexa Mietz’s exhibition “TASTY” at the University of Alberta’s FAB Gallery.
Drawing inspiration from an eclectic array of sources including the rich foliage patterns of William Morris, the enigmatic shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell, and the decorative wall niches she encountered while visiting the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Alexa creates visual experiences that elicit wonder. It also helps that the works contain a healthy amount of glitter, rhinestones and iridescent ceramic figurines (craft materials to fall in love with). Through her inclusion of kitsch, found objects and fingernails, this current body of work is at once magnetic and abject, while raising questions about class and taste. (The photos of these works simply don’t do them justice. They shimmer and are far more intricate in person…)
Easy Breezy, 2011
Back up a second….fingernails? Take a closer look at Easy Breezy…
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This post is written by Latitude 53’s Writer In Residence, Carolyn Jervis. She will be writing critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
Being an image-conscious child created some very particular struggles for my family. In the nineties we were just making it in our middle class economic reality, but we managed quite well on a single income thanks to my mother’s fastidious money management. Frozen and canned vegetables, and the fact that I was completely ambivalent about missing my expensive elementary school ski lessons, helped our financial security along as well.
A struggle my parents had because of our tight income, was dealing with their very visual and stubborn child’s extremely particular ideas about self-presentation. Somehow I was able to wrangle more than a couple of brand new Northern Getaway cartoon animal sweatshirts, in purple or teal, to put in the mix with hand-me-downs from my cousin which I inherited from my older sister. I must have given my parent’s financial ledger quite the headache.
Power in Passivity
Ideas of privilege, oppression, and agency have been churning through the mixer in my brain since I visited Jody Macdonald’s exhibition, Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?, on the last day of April. The artist’s series of little fabric sculptural figures, rendered in immaculate and staggering detail, provided a great jumping off point for me to delve into ideas of how visuality informs identity. Specifically speaking, it provides some pretty rich material about how much of a hand we can have in this process.
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